Interview: Martin Lawrence and Debra Messing

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The stars of Open Season.

By Stax

IGN recently got the chance to speak with Martin Lawrence and Debra Messing at a roundtable interview in Los Angeles about their new film, Open Season. The toon is the first release from Sony Pictures Animation.

Lawrence provides the voice of Boog, a big, lovable grizzly bear who has been domesticated by his owner/mother figure Beth, a red-headed park ranger voiced by Messing. After Boog gets into trouble, thanks to the antics of a hyper little buck named Elliot (voiced by Ashton Kutcher), Beth is forced to return him to the wilderness.

Unfortunately, Boog and Elliot have run afoul of the maniacal hunter Shaw (voiced by Gary Sinise) and must avoid his wrath now that it is open season. Boog later leads the other wild animals of the region in making a stand against the hunters.

Neither Lawrence nor Messing had done an animated feature before Open Season. Lawrence was drawn to the project because "they could put my voice into a big bear and hopefully make him likeable and lovable and energetic and fun. That was interesting for me to see that come along, and I was excited about doing the project."

For Messing, "the timing of it was so perfect because I was pregnant at the time. I was also working on Will & Grace at the time, but as you know animation takes three plus years to do. I'm such a big fan of animation. It's something I've always wanted to try and so when it came up it was just like, 'Oh, thank you.'"

Both Lawrence and Messing had to get accustomed to recording their performances separately. "The whole process of working in animation at first was so intimidating and scary because you have no one to act opposite and so much of it is having courage to try different things and to make yourself look like an idiot," Messing explained. "(The animators and directors) really become the architect of the whole creative vision. At first, that was kind of scary and daunting [but] very quickly, it became thrilling and liberating. ... It was almost like going back to graduate school and being in a theatre games class where it's like 'Oh, let's try this.'"

Boog (voice of Martin Lawrence) and Beth (voice of Debra Messing).

The cast, in fact, did not even meet each other until it came time to do press for the film. Lawrence finally met Kutcher just a few weeks before the film's L.A. press junket, while Messing first met Lawrence only moments before conducting this interview.

"The hardest thing about it was that we would do something for one month and then come back four months later and then have to pick up where we left off," Lawrence said. "That was the hard part where the directors, Jill [Culton] and Roger [Allers], would constantly feed us everything we needed to get us back on track and get our energy where we needed it. It was a lot of fun. When I look at the movie, and I look at how me and Ashton's chemistry is without him ever being in the room, I'm amazed at what they have done."

For a comedian like Lawrence, the restrictions of working in animation were not as limiting one would expect. "I stayed kind of right between the lines because it was animation and it was children. So, I didn't want to adlib the wrong thing or whatever. I like that. I like the fact that directors are like coaches. They draw up the play and this is what you run. I like that guidance because I'm in unfamiliar territory."

Messing echoed that sentiment. "Everything was a first for me. I thought I was just going to go in, say all my lines and that would be it. The way it worked was I would go in and we would put some things down. Then we would have Ashton come in and put some things down and Martin. They would start to edit things together and see what was working and what wasn't working and sort of construct it and redefine it as it went along. There were scenes or parts of scenes that I redid several times because they had changed the approach of a scene on the other side of it. So it was really interesting, the fine tuning at the very end."

The filmmakers advised Messing to "represent the female point of view as much as possible because, obviously with the guys and the animals, it's so comic and it's so playful. Then you have this other element of sort of the maternal child relationship, nurturing. The struggle of when to let go, when to encourage change. How do you do that? It's a very universal theme and it was important to them that it land. ... They said to give it as much heart as possible and to ground the film as much as possible."

In Lawrence's estimation, the cast and filmmakers have accomplished what they set out to do. Now that he has seen Open Season, Lawrence declared, "I love it. And to see this movie onscreen, I have to say is one of the best films that I've done."